• Question: Is there any debates in psychology that you feel passionate over?

    Asked by anon-282368 on 4 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Christina Brown

      Christina Brown answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      I predominantly work in the field of spatial navigation and lots of studies suggested that women have worse spatial navigation than men, but it’s way more complicated than that! A lot of the study designs for these experiments were flawed in that they never separated women and men into groups based on how spatial navigation they did as a job/or during life. Later studies that separated women and men into those that played videogames or not found that, although men did better in spatial maze task overall, there was no difference between men and women who played videogames (who got the best scores). It was just that fewer women were playing videogames that involved spatial navigation and mazes.
      Our brains are plastic and our daily experiences affect what parts of our brain will become more active. So someone that uses the spatial part of their brain (playing with lego, videogaming, orienteering) will have a brain that is more ready to learn newer spatial navigational tasks, regardless of gender.

    • Photo: Lisa Orchard

      Lisa Orchard answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      On our Masters in cyberpsychology course we have a whole module where we cover a different key debate each week. I do a session called “Is the Internet making us stupid?” and we consider evidence around the Google Effect (how Google maybe altering our brains as we no longer need to remember information). I am quite passionate, however, that the Internet is not affecting our intelligence. We have to learn how to technology to get the best out of it, but I believe it can enhance our knowledge.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Hi JoeL
      I am very passionate about educating people around mental illness stigma, most notably schizophrenia and violence. A lot of people are scared of those with severe mental health problems. Probably stemming from high profile media cases such as the ‘Yorkshire ripper’ who pleaded in his defence he was hearing voices telling him to kill people. But the truth is those with severe mental illness are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. In fact, they are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      In research in to math anxiety there is debate over the use of a mental resource we use to work out sums called “working memory” – some people think that math anxiety is causes a lack of number sense and ability (know that 7 is bigger than 5 by just looking at them), but I definitely believe that math anxiety causes a reduction in working memory. When we get anxious we get negative thoughts in our head that we can’t control, and we struggle to focus, because the negative thoughts (we call them ruminations) use up working memory, so when you’re doing math and you have the thoughts you have less working memory to use than you are used to!
      Most people tend to trust the working memory argument, but there are still some who deny it has any role!

    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 5 Mar 2021: last edited 5 Mar 2021 1:46 pm

      In my area of research (resilience), some researchers put mice through psychological stress to investigage how they become resilient. I feel strongly about using animals in psychological research. I love animals and sometimes I feel conflicted whether it’s worth putting them through psychological and physical harm for the purposes of research.

    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Ohh this is interesting! It’s not specifically relate to psychology, but I work in interpersonal threat detection with the police! Debating over the justification of use of force is something I feel strongly about and hope to address with my research!

    • Photo: David McGonigle

      David McGonigle answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      Hi Joe! Goodness me, yes, I’m passionate about loads of debates and theories, but I’ll try to be reasonably brief!

      So while I have a lot of opinions on various questions that have arisen around my work and in neuroscience in general, I do have to admit that often, in a debate in science, neither side comes out on top.

      The truth, boringly, often lies somewhere in between the two. This is often part and parcel of taking a pretty complex question in science and squishing and squashing it down so that it’s simplified into a yes/no perspective. For example: one of the classic debates in psychology and neuroscience is ‘nature vs nurture’. Even the name is aggressive: it sounds like a boxing match! This debate usually takes a given trait (intelligence, personality, etc) and considers if it can be explained by your genetics (nature) vs your environment while you’re growing up (nurture). But for most questions where nature vs nurture is debated, the truth is rarely exclusively one or the other: both have their roles to play.

      On a more personal note, I often feel passionate when I see scientists blindly arguing for one or another side of a debate just because it’s their ‘thing’ (so in my example above, a behavioural geneticist may argue that nature is always going to win out as an influence, while a social psychologist may focus exclusively on nurture as an explanation). Scientists can be very irrational in these kinds of debates…

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